There is a
particular joy in Mairéad Byrne, a spontaneity difficult to find in
other authors. Liveliness and a cheerful attitude - popping playful
words /laughter, happiness and beauty/ from these lines, as much as
a strong perception of all the possibilities given to someone who is
a woman, young, brilliant, independent, and lives in a big town. The
white and the black. In its fullness. To it there is the quick
spirit of Byrne, her enchantment of life, her deepest consciousness
of being a mother - responsibility as a teacher, her capacity of
distancing herself from the world and of seeing it plunged into its
sounds, movements, attractions and repulsions, of becoming every
part of it, of detecting the relative absurdity of it all, together
with an indirect sour comment which leaves in you that partaking of
an unsaid emotional event with all its unexplainable and sometimes
unbearable bitterness. Recurrent as if in dreams and/or nightmares
are those streets, alleyways, which go up and down in all
directions, windy - “wind gusting. It was always November or
February or March” -, things disappear, they come back and go. The
Irish streets ran by bicycle, upright with an ache in her thighs,
“white breath billowing above the white road”; the American streets
walked through, by scooter - public transports, “oesophageal
traffic, streets keyed high with the shrieks of children”, or mental
passages connecting people and events. We are caught into the
meditative level accompanying the position of a person who has to
fight against the pretentiousness of already allocated pieces in
this colorful and often airy - but air of a tangible kind - mosaic
to accommodate those who pull the threads most powerfully, not
specifically at a political level.

Thus here is
Byrne with THE NEW CURRICULUM to explain you what she has learnt,
how she is able to move around in our contemporary daedalian
labyrinth, and how she got to avoid imminent ever-present
disasters.

There is her
elegy to PUBLIC TRANSPORT and her beautiful gifts - a holiday to the
Canary islands, toblerones and Milky Bars, medals, a boyfriend - to
all those kids and their moms with the shopping, and the onions
rolling at the turns of the bus, and the disarrayed unease of having
to deal with it all in a single hectic day.

There is the
spirit of the Irish, something of that distant Saint Brendan who
crossed the ocean to reach America. The spirit of the immigrant who
in CEAD MILE FAILTE (One Hundred Thousand Welcomes) is looked at,
despised because a foreigner, by those “kind souls who didn’t think
we might need a table”, “those kind
souls...”

and we are
reminded of Shakespeare’s: “He is an honorable man” in Julius
Cesar.

And a Byrne
who steps out on stage like one of the most exquisite theater
characters:

“I heard a
man boast about putting a courgette or a parsnip into a
poem...”

when she can
fit “an entire fish and chip shop” into hers, and here is the final
line: “So there! My poem is full to bursting point! Beat
that!”.

Byrne’s
anxiety enclosed in her visual poetic world lightly scrapes the long
brilliant sequence of images with striking impressions because of
their inborn lucidity, nothing can escape the sharpness of her
intelligence. Often coupled with a keen sense of humor. I can almost
see Mairéad marching out of the door of this incompetent doctor,
“prescription in hand, which I filled ...”.

And there is
a longing for something missing, the intensity of which carries you
away, maybe due to her living between two worlds, Ireland (her
childhood, THE POOLS) and Providence, Rhode Island (her youth and
maturity), or the consciousness of something lost, or the simple
fact of being afraid, which as Mairéad Byrne says, rhymes with her
name. Interesting within this context becomes the found poem: COMMON
VERBS IN THE LANGUAGE, a list of the most used verbs in Irish. To
follow A TYPICAL IRISH COTTAGE with its most musical therefore
untranslatable central stanza “... rainbarrel plop and the crack of
cement gutter’s drip and its drop and its struts rusted outlet...”,
a vivid work of conceptual art.

And yes, THE
PILLAR is the towering poem of the entire collection especially if
you listen to it read by the author
at:

http://www.wildhoneypress.com/BOOKS/The%20Pillar_fulltext.htm, the almost imperceptible changes in her voice,
characterized by a full rich round tone, lead you through what is
always perceived but never expressed in her poetry. A willingly
masked fragility behind the enlargement of what can be seen,
masterfully described; or what cannot be seen, as in this specific
case Horatio Nelson himself. With the centrality of the pillar (from
a note we understand that it was “blown up by the Irish Republican
Army on Easter Monday 1966), interpreted by Alan Sondheim as the
pillar of language in its dis/location of location throughout the
entire poem (http://www.wildhoneypress.com/Reviews/Sondheim%20review.htm).

To reach as
in a crescendo the all including comprehensive thought of Byrne as
the Mother of All

“I’ve known
childbirths

I’ve given birth to
rivers

...”

“My body has
flowed like the rivers”

Starting
from her private life with Marina and Clio, her two daughters who in
that “yellow hutch all lit up” raise they arms and welcome - welcome
their mother back home, to that totemic construction, strength from
which her self finds nourishment:

“Still I
will touch your eyelash

with my tiny comb.”

A long
moment of poetry is NELSON & THE HURUBURU BIRD by Mairéad Byrne,
for its continuous fragrance, surreal lyrical composition which
finds expression through a most lively choice of strong musical
terms, and which endlessly surprises you in its twists and turns,
straight through and upside downs, direct emotional responses as
much as concealed feelings, the loss of the central “I” and at the
same time the precise image of Mairéad Byrne as she is - as if
portrayed in a photograph, the richness of the arts all called to
support the word in its limits but also in its limitless
possibilities of expression and
interrelation.